And the River Gave
by sedemihcrA
Summary: Oneshot. Asuka Langley Souryu. Young, attractive, precocious, GermanJapanese, sitting under the crust of Tokyo3 in an artificial dreamland, River surrogate.


**Quick A/N:** There are _lots_ of drug references in this story. I am not promoting drug use. Consider yourself warned.

Also, special thanks to Fresh C for prereading and generally being a responsible, honest human being and author.

Furthermore, this entire concept (well, most of it) is taken from a much better short story by William Gibson called _The Hinterlands_. Do yourself a favor and read it. Then read his opus, _Neuromancer_, the greatest science fiction novel of our generation.

* * *

**And the River Gave**

When Ritsuko hits the switch, I am dreaming of Munich, a night walking back from the ballet on wet dark cobblestone. I can't really describe what happens next—perhaps I don't really understand, bolting to consciousness from dreamy unreality—maybe it's just that nothing in the real world can tap directly into receptors in your brain like the A10 connectors, but electrocution probably comes the closest. That moment of agony, frozen, stretched, then repeated like a feedback loop or some poor bastard letting Tokyo Metro's third rail give him all it was worth before tossing his brains across the morning commute. Suicide that way was supposed to be pretty popular here in Japan. Waking up to it, day after day, I couldn't begin to imagine why. So I scream. I always have, it's like my little joke, my little "Hey, fuck you too, Akagi," as I stumble in and out of last night's barbiturates, focus flexing wildly like some amateur photographer. The world blurs, stretches, so that Ayanami's serene face, staring back at me from a thousand different shapes and sizes jumble together.

I remember who I am, the aftershocks of pain setting me into shivers on the bunk. Asuka Langley Souryu. young, attractive, precocious, German-Japanese, sitting under the crust of Tokyo-3 in an artificial dreamland, River surrogate.

Ritsuko's voice sparkles through the humps resting on my scalp, clean and clear as the fresh approaching dawn—that means there's another fish on its way. "I hate it when you do that." It sounds like she's trying to quit smoking again. Another nicotine migraine grating behind her voice. Everyone is addicted to something here.

"You should try it some time. It's like the negative print for an orgasm."

"I'll have to take your word on it." She's sounds smug, the bitch. "Hey, are you getting early cramps or something? Your A10s are looking a little spiky today…" She pauses, and I imagine her calling up the mountains of data the two red lumps pry out of my body with every passing second. "Barbituates again? God _damn_ it, Asuka."

I reach up and scratch the plastic red beetles feeding secrets of my brain up the invisible wire, run my fingers through a pigtail. "Your readings are off, I just need the sleep." This is as far as the conversation will go because Ritsuko wouldn't wake me up like this if she had time to reprimand me over substance abuse—and everyone uses, hell, for the surrogates it's practically a way of life.

I collapse back into the memory foam and slam palms over my eyes to cover the fading darkness of a false twilight. Ritsuko persists.

"Don't bother lying down. A little fish just swam back up the River, recovery's just getting ready to pry him out of Adam. We'll need you in the Geofront, like now."

My throat turns dry. Surrogates shouldn't get repeats this quickly, hurts their re-acclimation period and kills results. You have to give me time to fall in love all over again. I like to get results. "Who?"

"One Shinji Ikari, homegrown and fresh out of Tokyo-3. Well… you know what I mean. Got his prodigy report in physics, plays the cello." She talks over my groaning. "This is confirmed, ego border crossed, EEG looking nominal."

Not every Entry Plug has a little fishy swimming in its LCL. Some come back empty. In some, the messier ones, the fishy's all put together wrong. Some don't come back at all.

"You're not his perfect match per se—"

The rage of the substance comedown bursts nova from my tongue. "Then what the fuck did you get me up for, bitch?"

She kills my tirade before I can get any more irate. "He's a match for Hikari, but she's on leave. Sorting things out, you know."

I know all about "sorting things out." Done it a few times myself, when I indulged a bit too far. Hikari is topside at an _onsen_ out in Hakone. She's a real shitcase, one of those surrogates that doesn't know how to play the substance game—right now she's probably riding another low after one of her sky high, cocaine-infused manics. NERV knows how to fix kids like her up, probably saw the breakdown coming before she did. They had to figure it out pretty early on: you put all these kids our age in proximity with all those drugs and someone's bound to need a little counseling from time to time.

She was a real bitch the few times I'd met her. A major inferiority-complex and a serious lack of self-control; she'd crash out soon I imagined, spend up the rest of her pension on designer drugs and either off herself or get committed somewhere—that happened a lot with these types, I'd seen graduates like her in the tabloid news before. "**Star Candidate From the NERV Program Overdoses, Parents Concerned**" But perhaps I'm just being harsh—no one really gets along with a close match your own psychosexual profile.

"Where'd you get the pills from, anyway?" I resist the urge to laugh at her. She already knows where. "From Kaji?"

"A little birdy gave them to me." One of them wakes up on my cue and begins twittering just outside the crack of the window.

Kaji has two years on me at sixteen and will be phased out in another year or less, just like the rest of us. But the older kids have ways of getting things, everyone does eventually. Developed networks with the right technicians, the right guards. Money, favors, even sex. Currency and product were abundant down here. And as long as we did our jobs, Ritsuko and the rest of them wouldn't do much more than slap a wrist now and again. Christ if only the public knew how fucking unglamorous it all was, how fucking trashy, not the heroic lifestyle the PR team cooks up for our brief public experiences. I'm good at those with my fake smile, foreigner's good looks, and articulate Japanese. I trade in Photo-Ops for vicodin or methadone, depending on mood.

"I'm giving you five minutes. If you're not up by then your two best friends are coming to help."

I am friends with the orderlies, in a way. Sometimes I scream at them but sometimes we're civil. And I'm feeling civil this morning.

I stretch and yawn in the embers of sunlight beginning to seep over the horizon. Through the windows, the Geofront curves round and round, designer forests and riverbeds built on the backs of a thousand Tokyo construction crews. The trees that rise next to third floor of the dormitory tangle and divide across indigo perfection like so many black nerve endings reaching for the morning. Somewhere at the zenith of the bluing sky and another kilometer through bedrock and metro lines the city of Tokyo-3 lives and breathes, whether asleep or awake I cannot know. Our timeline is snapped back to zero every time a new fish comes in, making for the perfect sunrise just as the lonely soul finally emerges from the Entry Plug, the start of their first glorious day in this prison shaped as paradise.

Somewhere beyond the ridgeline just high enough to hide the dormitory, the recovery team is scrambling, digging carefully at the fading singularity encased in the spinal column of the giant sleeping in fetal position: Adam. Around here we just call it the River.

The Americans call it the Dark, which captures the sense of isolation and conjures (correctly) the void of space. Arguably close. My home country, Germany, calls it the Edge, too permanent and one-way sounding to be exact. Around here, we just call it the River. Easy to swim down, hard to swim back. But my fish is a good swimmer it seems. Shinji Ikari, you little prick, you fucked up my beauty sleep.

Ritsuko, enjoying her little power trip, flicks the fluorescents on as I begin to dress, instantly lighting up our portraits and poses of our Saint Rei that Kaji taped up all over the room in a collecting frenzy the past few months, another manifestation of his OCDness as the phase out approaches. Sheared out of newspapers, magazines, or stripped from the net, she twinkles her eyes at me behind conservative bangs. National hero, our Patron Saint of the River. Rei Ayanmi, the little fish that could.

Pilot and First Child Rei Ayanami was one of the last in series of increasingly harebrained and pathetic maneuvers to yield some sort of information or purpose out of the slumbering giant found buried under the evaporating ice of the Antarctic. The Americans, having found it first, would name it the appropriately Judeo-Christian "Adam." That name fell to the wayside after Rei's little experiment, much too innocent and human-centric to really fit the strange thing.

When initially discovered, the giant humanoid approximation was met with much fanfare and fervor, science around the planet hailing it as the greatest discovery made by mankind. However, public opinion on the glowing gargantuan turned to annoyance then to defeat as it became apparent that the big thing didn't seem to do all that much unless you counted the world's largest nightlight. All attempts to probe its materials or scan it proved fruitless. It swallowed sonar, left nothing on nanoswabs, and shattered diamond bit drills.

Speculation had already established the alien nature of the artifact and claimed that it was planted for humanity to discover at a much later date, probably when we could figure out what exactly the damn thing did. But scientists meddled on, though slowly giving up, losing interest or hope or both.

Reluctantly, the Americans turned over jurisdiction of sleeping beauty to Japan which in turn encased it in the bunker which would eventually transform itself into the Geofront—the forest, lakes and sunshine, would come at a later date.

All of the striking images of the girl's petite frame, staring back at me with that penetrating gaze reveal none of the banality of the experiment that would lead to her remembrance and legacy. Rei was one of those historical figures that wound up much more famous than most had expected.

She descended the cylindrical shaft hollowed into the back of Adam, guided in by the basic telemetry of the scouting unit and began the project she had proposed for the contest; the award had gone to her after a long selection process in the nationwide high school science competition. Tokyo University had already given the family the acceptance letter. The "real" scientists sneered or simply watched patronizingly as little Rei tinkered clumsily with the puzzle none of them had even begun to crack—they were pleased to give her a few minutes with their Rubik's Cube if it meant more grant money. NHK cameras studded the sidelines while anchors chattered mindless trivia back and forth to hype up the event, all the while the little picture of Rei's determined brow furrowing in the corner of the screen.

At fourteen, she was the youngest person to ever travel into the heart of the mysterious shaft bored into Adam's back. In the corner of the broadcast I had watched at least a thousand times as a child, her counter for experiment minutes ticked away she began setting off the radio flares, calibrated at 1420 megahertz, the precise broadcast frequency of the hydrogen atom. One by one the flares erupted into the cylinder as her probe wheeled further and further into the angled shaft and all the while the giant showed no sign of noticing. Rei's hundrum idea was giving humdrum results. An NHK anchor stifled a yawn.

At precisely the midway point of the shaft, Ayanami started her twentieth flare, and then, something very strange happened. Ayanami's relay, broadcasting her position to scientists and monitors the world over, stopped. The Data, useless thus far, turned silent.

Somewhere in Osaka University's supercomputing labs, a balding overweight technician dropped his favorite bento lunch onto the floor. In Hawaii, a frustrated intern for the late shift began to scream at his monitor, cursing Microsoft's tepid tech support. Chiho Miguchi, the onsite correspondent for NHK's coverage said with a frantic, tempered voice: "there appears to be a problem."

Little Rei had crossed the river. Humanity's first little fish was swimming free.

* * *

The trip to Central Dogma is a series of elevators and airshafts, the enormity of the architecture dwarfing me in its hard, smooth geometries. Polygon solids stretching in every direction, so unbelievably massive, they appear platonic to my limited perspective. The Geofront in its totality, subsystems included, can easily fit the volume of Tokyo-3 under the armored shell of its egg with breathing room to spare. I'm somewhere beneath the sculpted wilderness of its surface, riding the tunnels up to Dogma and suit fitting. Only in these moments, riding under the surface of our elaborate hoax, do I truly begin to feel my insignificance. Somewhere above me, an airlock gives a ghostly howl. The air in here smells devoid of the nature squeezed in above us.

As the final security seal clicks open, central command looms into view. Its cornucopia of tactical traceries crisscross through the air and appear to overlap with their floating parlor tricks of holographic perspective. Most of the graphics describe the data of Shinji's re-entry, dramatic but limited scrapings that can never illuminate where exactly the fish go or where they come back from or if these are even the same place. The sensors, no matter how advanced we make them, always come back blank. The budget for that department gets crunched every year, and their skeleton crew is resentful.

Around me, technicians hug tight to their cubicles or scurry across the room in random lines to their next point of interest. Through the fine lines and bright colors of the assorted tactica, Ritsuko stares at me, beady-eyed behind her black-rimmed glasses and white coat, tracking my progress through the floor and up to fitting, on the upper most level.

"Waking up, are we?" she asks, as the lift brings me up to her level. Her voice doesn't quite sound the same in person. Some of the clarity of the words she can pour directly into my eardrum loses its focus in the din of the room.

"You're a real asshole off of your cigarettes," I bite back.

I know the routine. I slip behind the meager privacy screen they provide and into my red Plugsuit. The stretchy polymers of its surface shrink to my skin with a click on the left wrist and exhalation of air, vacuum suctioning me gently. It doesn't smell like the plastic aroma I always expect with its touch—it never smells the same in fact. It's because the suit has begun emitting the precise combination of pheromones NERV has determined will attract Shinji Ikari: one part mother's breasts, one part middle school crush, and a whole mix of finer ingredients scent minutia that will remind him of his bedroom, his elementary school playground, and a whole swath of other safe, happy things to explain Shinji that I am a friendly, fellow human being. The scent arouses me and my adrenaline; in many ways I live for these moments, the run-up to a perfect execution of the comforting girlfriend, the friendly mother figure, or the whatever else they want me to be. I run my tongue quickly across my lower front teeth and taste the excitement in my saliva.

I emerge to find the friendly face of a technician, making notes on a tablet. His eyes lock onto mine for a beat before he reaches down and begins to enter the code on the stainless steel briefcase next to his feet.

The name card reads SHIGERU, and I peg the short-clipped haircut as straight JSDF, fresh out of combat, Taiwan maybe, or Malaysia—he's shot his share of poor folk and now he's got a cushy rotation at home, not too far from the girlfriend with no guerillas lurking about, car bombing his morning coffee. He's new on the rotation, polite and careful with every motion he makes. I remind myself to alert Kaji to him, but he's too new to be any use to our meager stash probably. Won't come around until Kaji's phased out. That little reminder must set my rates aflutter because Ritsuko frowns from the console above me, quickly glancing my way.

"Eyes on the prize Souryu," she says softly from above.

He takes out the drugs. They're beautiful in all their shapes and sizes. The shocking green of cannabis, the fluttering tar-brown of heroine, the silky white of Peruvian cocaine. Today I get all the best tricks, even a few designer pills nobody's ever heard about, and of course, the coup de grace, MDMA, the wonder drug behind ecstasy and a great bonding tool. He checks, then rechecks the list, making sure everything is prepared and sealed in place—only I have access to the little compartments hidden all across the suit once he hits the switch. As we finish our little stuff-and-check song-and-dance, Ritsuko addresses me again.

"His prodigies were physics." Prodigies, the special schools candidates would attend before being accepted into the program. Kids of fourteen did not have time or room for very much in their brain so most schools honed in on their strength and pressed it vigorously. Physics was one of the more difficult programs to get into. I'd been physics.

"Sounds like a perfect fit."

"Stay safe. If I say back off, you do it."

Handlers and surrogtes have a strange relationship—the handlers call the shots, they're the ones that rescue you when he's started crying out for his pet dog or he's getting a little paranoid and withdrawn on you. But the surrogates are the real muscle of the operation—we have to play it by ear, call it how we see it, and stay vigilant about keeping our little fishes content. I step over to the lift. The shoulder clamps come on firmly, then tug up gently, my feet now barely grazing the surface of the catapult lift. Shigeru makes another tick on his checklist.

"REMs are calming down. He's waking," she says, eyes fixed on the data.

It's the last thing I hear before the kick of the electromagnet pops me up the shaft. My stomach stretches to fill my shoes as the Gs push down on my limp form, dangling from the shoulders. They say it's like being a fighter pilot taking off a carrier, or even, an astronaut. Maybe I'll try that, one day, when I'm done with all this.

* * *

Little Rei disappeared with her probe without so much as a peep. She came back like a cannon shot, set alarms off over the entire NERV defense line, from Kyushu up to Hokkaido, the series of monitors we'd put in place ever since her tragic and mysterious disappearance.

She popped back into the local spacetime as if she'd never left, probe and all blinking back into the innards of the quarantined monster. Fifty-three hours later, a skittish volunteer named Hyuuga, complete in armored exoskeleton, shimmied into the shaft through Adam's spine and down into its darkness. He spent another two hours, torching very slowly the right sized opening to crawl through with an arc welder, finally cracking the proper rectangle out of the probe's side with a thunderous metallic echo. They reeled it up and out of the shaft into a mass spectrometer just minutes later; it would yield nothing after many months of test and retesting again, just as all the intact sensors would. The insides of the entry vehicle were darkened but unworn by the passage of time, no real indication that Ayanami had been gone for two full years. Hyuuga wiggled and maneuvered the armored suit through the makeshift opening and into the central chamber. Then he found her.

She was nude, pale and gleaming, absolutely still and curled eerily into the precise positioning of the giant, fetal with knees brought up to her chest and face pressed against them. Over the secure feed being piped back from Hyuuga's helmet, various agents of government did their best not to gasp.

Her clothes lay piled beside her, school uniform folded neatly, shoes aligned at its side with mathematical precision. As Hyuuga edged closer to the still little girl, her called her name once. Then twice. No response. It was then they noticed the tiny object, clenched under her fists.

As gently as he could Hyuuga reached out and grabbed the silver tube squeezed between both hands. It slid out from her grip easily under the force of the armor's articulated pincer. Rei's head fell to the side with the pull of this motion, splaying her limp body across the cockpit to reveal a stone still face, eyes wide open and glaring into a secret so profound she would never share it with anyone.

They would diagnose her as catatonic two weeks later. And though science and all the governments of the world tried desperately to coax life back out of those dull eyes, the gleam never returned, living coma in place like a horrible shroud. It was the River's first victim. The second was one Dr. Naoko Akagi, brilliant mathematician and leader of the project which had sponsored the high school competition; she had wallowed in the aftermath of the scandal, withdrawing from her failed projects on Adam and becoming a recluse. I never talked to Ritsuko about her, though I wanted to some times. I wanted to ask why, after two years, she deposited herself two stories down and all over the trio of supercomputers she had just finished installing for NERV's soon-to-be Central Dogma.

Naoko's death could have been the end of the silly little humans, poking with sticks at things they could not understand. In a public relations sense, the giant had never had a worse reputation. Debates about NERV being buried with it were common fare for the nightly news, and international controversy over the contest and the disappearance were at an all time high with a fresh crop of conspiracy theories to match.

As for the silver-gray tube, it turned out to be a highly unusual Plutonium isotope, weapons grade in nature but consuming its own radioactive discharge even as its half-life whittled away. It tore the chemical sciences in half, opened up a rift as wide as the Pacific in radiocarbon dating and, by extension, Darwin's theory of evolution, and spurred raucous scientific debate well into the present. It also brought the birth of the N2 mine, and with it the ugly ritual sacrifice that would become known as the River. Because once the nations of the world realized just how valuable that little gray tube was, they wanted to see what else they could barter their children for.

The second candidate to be sent out was fourteen-year-old Kyoko Zeppelin Souryu, national persona and child prodigy, replete with college degree in biology from Munich University. They cloaked the affair in the deepest clouds of secrecy, and promised the family and the girl's newborn daughter (out of wedlock) a generous fraction of a percent of Japan's GDP in return for a trip down the spine, shooting hydrogen wavelength radio flares. At the midway point she too disappeared. Thirty-four days later she popped back into existence, screaming incoherently and clutching a bonsai tree full of DNA and bacteria with no known terrestrial counter-part. Souryu's tree. Twenty-six days later, when one of the aids left too early for the next shift, she hung herself from the fan above her hospital bed with a pair of stolen shoelaces. This was all I would ever know of my mother other than photographs and stories from my grand parents.

Her tree got its own field of xenobiology devoted entirely to… Souryu's tree. Her family and infant daughter, myself, became an overnight conglomerate from Japan's promises. And the River became a very deadly, and appealing mystery.

Six more teenagers later, Prime Minister Jigabachi received an extremely well-mannered conference call from the Kremlin, the Oval Office, and a handful of other prominent centers of power. One by one, the nations kindly offered the best minds and doctors of their societies to study and aid the largely ruined teenagers in exchange for certain specific terms regarding one sleeping giant and one plutonium isotope.

* * *

I wring out the shakes from the commotion of the ride up. In front of me, the last of the recovery crew are disappearing on the massive square that is sinking the giant down below the surface and into its holding chamber. The lakebed above it is just beginning to reseal itself and flood with water and the ultra-docile fish they've engineered for us to catch: a variant of the Koi but slower, more lethargic, nutritious, and easy to prepare. The gardener crabs' AIs get the command to hibernate and disappear out of my sight, titanium gray legs swishing nearly silent through the foliage.

Around me the impervious grass glistens with the dew of our artificial atmosphere, and begins to glow as the near dawn cycle ramps up, sun drawing closer to the noses of the gray and blue mountains painted in the distance. Birds of a hundred different Amazonian species begin to burble their calls, but they are sufficiently scattered and scarce enough to remain melodic, not overbearing in their chatter. The only clue to the whole illusion is the A10s pretending to be hairbands for my pigtails.

It is, for all its familiarity and artificial splendor, a paradise. Kaji makes quips about the theme park sculpted perfection and Ritsuko says she knows the names of every architect or landscaper to ever work on the rolling hills—and their scandalously high pay grade.

"We're just working our way through the last of the sedatives now. He'll be up any minute now," Ritsuko coos, sounding almost as though she's addressing herself; the handler-surrogate synchronicity is starting to make her words sound as though they are my own inner-monologue.

Kaji, who's planted himself conspicuously between the Plug and me, looks up at me and smiles, skips another stone across the lakebed's LCL. He's got his hair cut not too short, ruffled all over. Stubble running up either side of his jaw. His long arms dig in sand beneath the azure surface as Koi skirt his position lazily, programmed to be attracted to his splashing.

"Hey," he calls out. I come over to sit by him, avoiding physical contact. All that is reserved for the Pilot now, not my roommate.

"And he's supposed to be back across the ridge at camp three…" Ritsuko scolds privately in my ear. "Katsuragi girl, came in about a week ago, mute like a stone, and might be deaf too for all we can tell. Ayanami'd," she pronounces.

Kaji had moved in with me a week after my first nervous break down. A month into the job and I'd just gotten my first live one. He tried to tear my throat out after the first twenty-four hours, fried to crispy by the turrets hidden underneath the immaculate lawn we're perched on; he never woke back up. Shot my confidence all to hell. Then Kaji moved in one day, started putting up posters of Ayanami and telling stories about getting stoned on the dorm roof with the other kids and growing ganja out on the fringes of the Geofront where security was in lesser force or just plain didn't care. We made love a week later, my first time, and roomed together ever since.

"How's your little one I ask shyly?" I shouldn't have, but I'm nervous waiting for my own to pop out and I know he's here to help me cut through the last fiber of tension, like he always does.

"Oh, she's not too well. Cries every time I try and touch her." A soft, sad little sigh emits from his wide lips. "Doesn't look good, huh?" His tone tries to be neutral because he's getting attached the way all good surrogates do. "Little Misato is not going to make it, I think."

I pick up the first round flat stone I can find and bounce it off the surface, watching it skitter until it dives under for a final time. The less I know about Miss Katsuragi the better. She's probably one of the lost forty percent. Twenty percent are DOA, suicide before we can pop the hatch. Thirty never show up again. Forty are—in our wry language—Ayanami'd, so fucked up they'll never communicate again. The final ten are our specialty as surrogates. Because the final ten can function normally. For a little while, at least. Everyone winds up at the crazyhouse though, it's just a matter of time, and it's the surrogates job to stretch it as long as they can.

"What a fucking scam it is, huh? They're all Ayanami'd, aren't they? We just trick them for a little while that they aren't."

He starts to laugh, chuckle floating up through the reeds we're squatting. I don't like talking to Kaji when he gets this way. He's anxious because he knows Katsuragi isn't going well and he knows he's getting phased out soon.

"Minute's up," Ritsuko announces into my ear.

I begin to move away. "Bye, Kaj'."

"Good luck, babe," he says. A tear dribbles off his cheek before I can bear to turn away, disturbing the glass-still waters. A Koi surfaces at the disruption, hoping to find something edible, then scoots off.

Kaji's getting phased soon. I know it. Because once you're out of the three year window, your psychosexual profile for the finicky puberty of a fourteen-year-old just puts everything out of whack. Nobody stays a surrogate forever. It's something you just pick up one day and then put away another.

He stalks off into the long grass, heading back towards his own camp. For a moment I want to follow him, wrap my arms around him, and whisper that it will be okay, that I will see him on the outside and we can be together again. Even if it's a lie, like everything else in this paradise basin.

Ritsuko hits the pain switch for the second time that day. "Focus!" she snarls into my ear, easily reading my distraction with Kaji.

My head jerks up with the jolt. I spot the body in the deep waters, pushed on hidden jets towards the pearly sand of the shore I'm approaching. I pick up, speed reacting instantly to its sight, and jogging up just in time to pull the still sleeping body halfway out of the water and onto the sand; the LCL drains harmlessly from his nose and half-open mouth. Ritsuko is popping off his vital signs in rapid fire, confirming he's waking up.

His hair is cut short and conservative, crowning a feminine, attractive face. He's skinny but not shockingly so for a Japanese boy his age. And when his eyes pop open, the misty blue they reveal is disturbingly reflective of my own. The sunrise unpauses and begins to crest above the tallest peak of the faux mountains as I kneel down next to his confused expression. It casts shocking, hopeful orange onto everything, all the warm tones we could possibly paint of "everything's going to be all right."

His hands lash out with a guttural screech, and suddenly I feel the palms on either side of my neck, turning me over and pushing me into the sand, thumbs pressing deeper into my windpipe. Just like the first I ever handled. Trying to murder me. I didn't even make it to twenty-four hours this time.

As the seconds pass I do not struggle, waiting for the turrets to pop up and dull what little remains of his consciousness. Ritsuko is babbling furiously, not to me now, but I can hear her end of the conversation through the A10s. Something's wrong. The turrets are jamming up on a confused little crab that lost its way, its metallic shell acting like a Faraday cage for Ikari. She's asking for tranqs but his tiny pincers have short-circuited the peripheral subsystems. The next closest has a branch in the way, the Bird of Paradise on it singing its little heart out. Son of a bitch. Now calling for security. Too late, I think. Too fucking late Akagi.

How funny life is. The psychosexual profile is supposed to be the perfect match, but they say truest love is only inches from hate—maybe the pheromones were off, maybe it was the pigtails, or the matching eye color, or a million other possibilities that set him off. Because Pilots don't come back as normal people, and who's to say what they think, how they see us. As the hands press down harder and harder, I watch something like hate resolving in his face while he straddles me. And suddenly his eyes twist shut, squinting as they begin to water and a tremor of a sob surfaces from his throat.

This, I realize with total certainty, is rejection. His rejection of me, or maybe my rejection of him. I know this feeling so well. Have known it every waking moment since that day just after my fourteenth birthday. I know the haggard shame that comes with failing a legacy, the awful sense that you've left everyone down. The radio flares went off one by one, hours on end of me sitting there, waiting, praying in the giant's spine. Sitting at the midway point, ready to ride the singularity out into wherever it takes you. And then I was pulled out, screaming, wailing for the utter futility of it, that all encompassing sense of being left behind. I did not get chosen. I did not swim the hydrogen River, and see places untold.

It's what keeps you in this job, that drive for acceptance again. To reach out and touch just a little piece of what our glowing friend has to offer. If only briefly, before the glimmer in their eyes goes out like it always does. That is this sensation, the feeling I see crying out, begging to be heard in the tear-filled eyes dripping down onto my face. Rejection.

I reach up, even as consciousness begins to fade, and touch one cheek, wiping away the next salty drop as if to say: I know this feeling too. The hands stop pressing, release their grip. Air fills me so slowly, sweet and cool.

"Asuka?" he whispers. How he knows my name, I cannot understand. But I know what it is he feels. The rejection. In time, little one, we'll heal. I know it.

"I know."

He begins to cry. This one will be different than all the others, I think. This one came back whole.

_fin_

* * *

So you may recognize this story. I posted it on here before and took it down for reasons I'd rather not discuss; suffice to say it represented a massive lowpoint for my entire life as an author but, like a phoenix rising from the ashes, the story has returned edited and better than it ever was before! And there was much rejoicing! I'm marking this as complete only because I have a two unfished stories already on this site and another short work (six parts maybe) cooking in my brain, and to do justice to my readers I'm not going to leave you waiting for months for another chapter. Suffice it to say I am really thinking hard about a continuation on this depending on time constraints and creativity among other things. I think, as it is, it ends nicely but leaves the door open should I choose to return, much like Behind Closed Doors did.

Thanks again to Fresh C, and also Midnight Cereal, who I pestered to preread and then didn't bother to send him the newer version because I felt bad about being such a bother ;) Keep your eyes peeled for new chapters on Revolution and/or a new AU in the near future. Thanks for reading!


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